About Business Intelligence

Every organization's main aim is to stay ahead in this thriving competitive market place. To become successful one needs right decision making at the right time. For Taking right decisions one need right information. The information plays a key role here, which should be easily accessible, understandable and analyzable at anytime and anywhere. While in the process of business the following questions should be considered. The monitoring, analyzing and planning lies in these questions for any decision

·             What has happened?

  

                 Ex: Performance of business in the past like sales for particular region.

·           What is happening?

·           Why is this happening?

·           What will happen?

·            How to make this happen?

To acheive all this organization needs applications and tools.

§  To provide accurate and current information, organization requires a powerful RDBMS which is nothing but Data warehouse.

§  To gain deeper business insight and facilitate better decision making, reporting tools are required.

Business intelligence (BI) is a collection of applications and tools for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions and meet their requirements.

Architecture of BI

Before learning any ETL or Reporting tool one should know the Architecture of Business Intelligence. The above image will describe how the application and tools are interconnected to form a BI architecture. Let us start knowing briefly about each component before moving to Microstrategy reporting tool.

What is Data Source?

A Data Source is a facility for storing data. These data sources in turn stores organization's data in different forms like flat files, databases, data steam etc. These data sources hold day to day transaction level data. Every organization having different departments and each department may use different kinds of database for day transactions.

EX: Take any Banking sector. There should be many departments like Accounts, Loans, Cards, Investments, Insurance etc. All these departments may use different data sources for tracking the data. Account departments may use oracle DB, Cards department may use flat files, Insurance data coming from DB2 etc. This kind of data usually known as Transactional databases or OLTP(On line Transactional Processing).  All these data sources contribute seemingly unrelated data because all are in disparate formats.

In order to support reporting needs and take management decisions the unrelated data coming from different sources should be consolidated and put into one common place. The common place should be large, strong and robust. Which is called Data Warehouse or OLAP. We will discuss about OLAP next page. Transferring the data coming from different sources into the data warehouse  could be done by ETL.

What is ETL?